it’s never happened here

There are somethings that I dislike. The image above is a screen capture from a conversation I was part of recently and said by someone who I respect deeply. On this point, we disagree deeply however.

Modern DevOps culture demands a great deal of pragmatism. In particular it demands that you don’t solve problems before they become problems. It’s the benefit of working in a non-critical environment. We’re told that ‘just-in-time’ is the best fit for fast iteration and product development and who can argue with success? I wonder however if we’re losing a key component of good Engineering, that of forethought.

The conversation was around GitHub protected branches and whether they were a good idea for some/all our repo’s. I think these are a good idea for all repo’s and selected branches, especially master, and doesn’t take long to setup nor much in the way of maintenance or documentation. I can also understand my colleague’s position that there’s no need to go enable this everywhere as nothing bad has happened yet that would suggest this would be a good protective measure.

To me that’s a bit like putting the safety on after pulling the trigger. The thought’s there but the execution is suspect. It’s too Dev and not enough Ops for me.

In operations/SRE or whatever you call it these days, the paramount responsibility is safety. Safety leads to uptime. Uptime leads to sales. Sales lead to money. Money leads to wages. Wages lead to whiskey. Operations engineers are there to make sure that the business is supported and protected at all times. Operations engineers are there to ensure that engineering is able to deliver but that the what’s delivered is supportable and operable on an on-going basis – even if the entire engineering team changes. There is I think a fine distinction here between enabling the business and enabling engineering teams. Those two enablements often require subtle differences in approach, tact and execution. It’s the fine line that sometimes trips you up.

On this occasion I left this well alone, no one needs this kind of debate on a Friday and it’s a small thing. But small things have undone great enterprises before so in the back of my head a warning bell will sound all weekend! I like to think I allow teams I manage a great deal of autonomy and the operations team haven’t expressed any concerns. Whether that’s because it’s easier not to is up for debate – but not today.